Timely Goes Into Public Beta
A note: I'm writing this entry retrospectively, about four months after the fact, as part of an effort to document Timely's full story here.
After attending a web development bootcamp in 2024, I spent 2025 teaching myself Swift and SwiftUI. I made my first commit on what would become Timely in October 2025, and launched it into public beta on the 25th of May 2026.
Glanceable time remaining. That's what Timely is built around, bringing countdowns, alarms and timers into a single app. You put in an event and a start time, and Timely tells you exactly how long you have, right there on your lock screen and Dynamic Island. It can also calculate travel time, so instead of counting down to an event, you're counting down to when you need to leave.
The first public beta shipped with everything that defines Timely: Live Activities and Dynamic Island countdowns, AlarmKit-backed alarms that break through Focus modes, MapKit travel time estimates, calendar import, Apple Intelligence emoji suggestions, and comprehensive Shortcuts integration. The version people tested was, in most ways that matter, the app.
Between beta and launch, I redesigned the main view. The original layout split the app into two tabs: one for your list of countdowns (with a small button in the top right to create a new one), and a separate tab for browsing upcoming calendar events. Both paths led to the same editor, but they were split across the UI in a way that felt scattered. The redesign collapsed it into a single screen: your countdown list, with two large buttons pinned to the bottom, one to add a new countdown directly, one to browse your calendar and flow straight into the editor from there.
The initial wave of beta testers came almost entirely from a post I made on r/shortcuts, which felt like exactly the right community to start with. Timely was built to be a first-class Shortcuts app, and in many ways it exists to fill a gap I'd always felt personally: named timers have been a conspicuous blind spot in the iOS Shortcuts ecosystem for years.
Timely is free to download and try. There are no ads and no accounts.